While I agree that cloning the github repo is really simple, if thats going to be the recommended method then the rake take should be removed. Considering the rake task was changed to use the zip file when rails moved to github I think it should probably work too - I'm assuming its just a minor mistake in the script that generates the zip not actually pulling from the edge revision and should be relatively easy to fix. From the announcement about rails premiering n github

"If you don’t have git, or don’t enjoy running it on your platform, you need not fear. We’ve set up an automated task to produce a zip file of Rails Edge that’ll be kept up to date all the time: http://dev.rubyonrails.org/archi.... This is also what we’ve made the new rake rails:freeze:edge use."